For a trained architect, Alexandre Ciancio has taken an unexpected step in what to negate with his collage work series, Walkabout. By removing buildings, objects and landscape from the majority of his works, Ciancio manipulates the image so that the people photographed become objects themselves, a new visual architecture based on space, place and environment.
The Walkabout collages keep the black and white photographic qualities of an often wholesome, idealized past, and replace negative space with a soft pastel pallete, reminiscent of the same era. Depth is simultaneously given a flat quality, while figures are given a new background and environment, of their own creation. Ciancio poetically describes the series
“A walkabout, ie a multitude of people gathered in one place can be characterized by a container (location) and content (the crowd). With this definition it is thus possible to establish rules of the game: design images where all the spatial data are erased in favour of flat colours highlighting the different crowds and their relationship to space.
This rule is applied with six old black and white photographs, the various inhabitants of the images are highlighted by the lack of spatial information and the bright colours used to give depth to the images while giving them a degree of internal consistency .
These images are assembled diptych opponent whenever a frontal pose to pose in perspective. This dualism invites us into the image space and observe each of their people, their expressions, their eyes…” (via mutantspace and the jealous curator)